After my release from prison, I had to be resourceful in order to make a living. I didn’t possess many business skills, but one of my former prison mates lived next to a family that sold homemade banh loc—short, thick, tapioca noodles mixed into a tasty soup.[1] It seemed to make good profit for only a few hours of work per day, but we had one small problem. The recipe was a family secret, so we had to spy on his neighbors through a hole in the wall. Night after night, we watched them cook until we discovered that the secret was in the soup. The noodles were pre-made, but the soup was prepared the night before from a pork bone broth. They would boil the pig’s leg bones in a broth for about five hours until all the sweetness came out of the marrow. Then, they would scrape the foam off the top of the soup, so that it stayed clear instead of murky. They also added salt, msg, and rock sugar to flavor the broth before it was ready to sell. We watched this process many times until we felt confident we could do it ourselves.
Many of the ingredients were hard to find in wartime, so we had to buy them off the black market. Someone would spread the word that they were slaughtering a pig and we would visit them late at night to purchase the bones. Yet nothing came easy in those days. The first time we made banh loc, we bought a pig that was so sickly, its liver was completely black. We were a bit concerned that our soup might make people ill, but we made it anyway and hoped for the best. We ended up selling every bowl because our customers felt compassion for former prisoners like us. Some also knew that I had been in the Navy and wanted my advice about how to flee Vietnam by boat.
After our initial success, I went into business with my wife’s youngest brother, An, He scooped in the noodles, while I added the meat and broth. An’s wife and mine helped his mother prepare the meat inside the house, while his daughter, Jean, played at their feet in a plastic tub. The Cao family, who owned a real restaurant in town, gave us a pushcart to transport the giant stove for our soup. Then, we placed a pot, about one meter tall, on top of the stove. The pot was partitioned in half to cook the noodles on one side and boil the soup on the other. Another friend let us park our pushcart in front of his home rent free, then we set up tables nearby for seating. It was a bustling location on the corner where Tên’s family once had their home seized.
We soon needed a name for our restaurant, so I picked up an old oil drum lid and wrote two characters on it: Hai Dom: “Two Unskilled Chefs.” It fit us well since we really didn’t know what we were doing. This way, if the food wasn’t good, people would come with low expectations. At the beginning, our soup wasn’t as hot as the others and our ingredients remained a work in progress. Yet we eventually perfected our skills and did quite well for the two years until our escape from Vietnam. We even began to outsell the competition we had learned from by employing creative ideas. The other noodle man only made his soup with pork broth, so he took the day off whenever pig bones were not available. Yet since we were willing to use chicken broth, we could stay open every day. Occasionally, we also added special ingredients like shrimp. Then later, we included the option of hu tieu which appealed more to the Vietnamese.[2] This hu tieu congealed like a ball when we boiled it in water, so An would toss it in the air like a basketball and perform amazing tricks to entertain the crowd. We had to be entrepreneurs to make a living, but I like to think we made people happy with every bowl of noodles.
[1] Banh loc was a chiu chow recipe popular with older Chinese immigrants, whereas banh canh was the Vietnamese version.
[2] The older, Chinese immigrants who lived in Vietnam preferred the banh loc, but the younger people who grew up in Vietnam liked hu tieu—thinner rice noodles like the ones now used in pho.
